Contemporary cleaning appliances, such as dishwashers or clothes washers, may be a common convenience in many homes. In the case of a clothes washer, a user simply loads the cleaning appliance with laundry to be treated into a treating chamber, along with an optional supply of a treating chemistry, such as detergents, bleach, enzymes, and anti-spotting agents, and selects and initiates a cleaning cycle that may be subsequently automatically carried out by the cleaning appliance. An example of a typical cleaning cycle includes the steps of washing the laundry with heated liquid and optional treating chemistry and rinsing the laundry with heated liquid.
Cleaning appliances may be often provided with a dispenser for automatically dispensing one or more treating chemistries during a cleaning cycle. One common type of dispenser may be the manual or single use dispenser, which may be filled with only enough treating chemistry for a single cleaning cycle. These manual dispensers must be filled with treating chemistry by a user prior to each cleaning cycle of the cleaning appliance, which may be a tedious task that many users would prefer not to perform. Also, users may not supply the correct dosage of the treating chemistries for the selected cleaning cycle, which may negatively impact the efficacy of the cleaning cycle.
Bulk dispensing may be one solution that improves the ease of supplying treating chemistry in the proper dosage to the cleaning appliance for the user. However, many users are unwilling to purchase a new machine just for a bulk dispensing system.